a. Field of the Invention
The present invention pertains to computer memory storage devices and specifically to storage devices using RAID 0 architecture.
b. Description of the Background
Hard disk storage devices have certain inherent variability in data transfers due to the geometry of the disk platter. On tracks near the outside of the disk, data transfer rates may be much higher than data transfer rates for tracks on the inside. This is due to the fact that the speed with which the heads ride over the disk changes in proportion to the radius of the track location.
In a RAID 0 disk array, several disk drives are operated in parallel. When a data block is written to the array, the data may be written in ‘stripes’ wherein the data is divided among the various disk drives and written substantially simultaneously.
The performance of a RAID 0 array may be adversely affected by the data transfer rates of the various disk drives that make up the array. For example, when a stripe is written to an array, if all of the disk drives write to the outside tracks, the performance will be very good. When a stripe is written to the same array and all of the disk drives write to inside tracks, the performance may be much lower.
The performance specifications of a RAID 0 array may include a minimum data transfer rate. Such a rate will be dictated by the performance of the array when writing a stripe to the inside tracks of all of the disk drives simultaneously.
It may therefore be advantageous to provide a RAID 0 array wherein the variability of the data transfer rate may be less than standard RAID 0 arrays. It may be further advantageous to provide a RAID 0 array with a minimum data transfer rate that is higher than other RAID 0 arrays that are configured with the same disk drives.